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Author: Nazca Lines Tour Editorial Team
Quick Summary: The Nazca Lines were made by two related pre-Inca cultures of Peru’s south coast — the Paracas, who created the older hillside figures, and the Nazca, responsible for the giant designs on the flat pampa. The “why” has no single agreed answer, but the strongest evidence points to ritual activity tied to water and fertility, with the lines themselves functioning as pathways to walk rather than pictures to view. A 2024 AI-assisted survey added a genuinely new piece: different types of geoglyph appear to have served different social purposes.
Two cultures, working across roughly a thousand years.
The Paracas occupied the south coast before the Nazca and are best known for extraordinary textiles and elaborate burial practices. The geoglyphs associated with them are the older ones, concentrated around Palpa, about 50 km north of Nazca. They differ from the famous Nazca designs in two important ways:
That hillside placement is a significant clue. It suggests these earlier geoglyphs were meant to be seen by people standing in the valley, which weakens the idea that the tradition began as something addressed only to the sky.
The Nazca inherited and transformed the practice. They moved onto the flat pampa and worked at a far larger scale, producing the animal and plant figures the site is famous for — the Hummingbird, Condor, Monkey, Spider, Whale — along with thousands of straight lines and vast geometric trapezoids.
The Nazca were skilled potters, weavers and hydraulic engineers. The spiral puquios at Cantalloc, which still channel groundwater today, come from the same society. They built the ceremonial centre at Cahuachi, a complex of adobe mounds and plazas about 25 km west of modern Nazca, which appears to have been a pilgrimage site rather than a residential city. Cahuachi matters here, because several of the long straight lines appear to radiate toward it.
There isn’t a consensus, and any guide claiming otherwise is overselling. What exists is a set of proposals with different amounts of evidence behind them.
This is the explanation with the most support among archaeologists working on the site today.
The Nazca lived in one of the driest inhabited places on Earth, entirely dependent on seasonal river flow and groundwater. Their survival was a water problem. And the geoglyph evidence lines up with that:
The anthropologist Johan Reinhard argued that the lines are best understood as ritual pathways related to mountain-worship and water cults, a framing that connects them to widespread Andean practice rather than treating them as unique.
Closely related, and arguably the most useful single reframing: the lines may have been made to be walked, not looked at.
Many figures are drawn as a single continuous line that enters, traces the whole shape, and exits without crossing itself — the Monkey and the Hummingbird both work this way. That’s an odd design choice for a picture. It’s an obvious one for a path. Walking the outline of a hummingbird as a ritual act makes the “you can’t see it from the ground” problem disappear entirely, because seeing it was never the point.
The wide trapezoids fit this too, functioning as cleared ceremonial spaces where groups could gather.
The oldest scholarly theory, and the one that has weakened most.
Paul Kosok noticed in 1941 that a line seemed to align with the sunset on the winter solstice and called the pampa “the largest astronomy book in the world.” María Reiche spent decades developing the idea, arguing that lines and figures marked solstices, star risings and seasonal events.
In 1968 astronomer Gerald Hawkins ran the alignments through a computer analysis and found no more astronomical correspondence than chance would produce. With thousands of lines pointing in every direction, some will inevitably align with something.
That said, it hasn’t been discarded entirely. A limited astronomical element — a handful of deliberate solstice alignments within a much larger ritual system — remains plausible. What’s not supported is the idea of the whole site as a calendar.
It needs addressing because it’s the version many people meet first.
Erich von Däniken’s 1968 book Chariots of the Gods? proposed that the trapezoids were landing strips for extraterrestrial craft. There is no evidence for this, and several strong arguments against it. The pampa’s surface is soft — anything landing on it would sink, not glide. The construction technique is simple and well understood. The motifs are drawn from the Nazca’s own visual vocabulary, matching the animals and designs on their pottery and textiles. And a full-size figure has been reproduced with rope and stakes.
The theory also carries an assumption worth naming: that ancient Andean people couldn’t have organised and executed this themselves. The archaeological record says otherwise.
We go through the full range of proposals, including the more marginal ones, in our guide to Nazca Lines theories.
This is the most significant development in decades, and it moved the “why” question forward rather than just adding to the count.
A team from Yamagata University led by Masato Sakai, working with IBM Research, used machine learning to scan high-resolution aerial imagery across 629 km² of the Nazca pampa, flagging likely geoglyph locations for archaeologists to check on foot. Published in PNAS in September 2024, the survey confirmed 303 new figurative geoglyphs in six months — roughly a sixteenfold increase in the rate of discovery, and close to a doubling of the known relief-type catalogue.
The interesting result wasn’t the number. It was the pattern. The data showed that the two types of geoglyph behave differently:
| Line-type geoglyphs | Relief-type geoglyphs | |
|---|---|---|
| Size | Very large | Small |
| Main motifs | Wild animals (around 64%) | Humanoids, decapitated heads, domesticated camelids |
| Location | Along the network of lines and trapezoids, near major routes | Beside informal walking trails, typically within sight of them |
| Likely use | Community-scale ritual activity | Viewed by individuals or small groups passing by |
In other words: the giant animal figures look like communal ritual monuments requiring organised effort, while the many small human-related figures look more like something made and seen at the scale of a person walking a trail — closer to roadside markers than to ceremonial architecture.
That doesn’t answer the “why” completely. It does mean the question was probably badly framed for a century. There may be no single purpose to explain, because these aren’t one thing.
Our article on the new Nazca Lines discovered covers the discovery programme in more detail.
Worth being direct about what remains unknown:
Anyone giving you a confident single answer is going beyond the evidence.
None of this requires you to take a position. But the “pathway not picture” idea is worth carrying with you on a flight, because it reframes what you’re looking at — you stop asking who the drawings were for and start noticing that they’re made of routes.
Flights run from the María Reiche Neuman aerodrome, about 4 km from Nazca’s Plaza de Armas, last 30–35 minutes, and cover the main figures. If you’d rather see the older Paracas-era work, the Palpa geoglyphs about 50 km north sit on hillsides and are considerably more legible from ground level — a useful counterpoint if you want to understand how the tradition began before it moved onto the flat pampa. Our Nazca Lines tour guide covers how the flight day is structured.
Did the Incas build the Nazca Lines?
No, and the gap is larger than most people assume. The Nazca culture had declined by around AD 650. The Inca empire didn’t expand into this region until the fifteenth century — roughly 800 years later. That’s a longer stretch than separates us from medieval Europe. The Incas would have encountered the lines as ancient features of a landscape they’d inherited, much as we do. The confusion is understandable, since the Incas are Peru’s most famous pre-colonial civilisation, but they had nothing to do with making these.
Why would anyone make something they couldn’t see?
This assumes the purpose was viewing, which is probably the wrong starting point. Many figures are drawn as a single unbroken line that can be walked from entry to exit without retracing — a design that makes little sense for an image but perfect sense for a path. If the act of walking the outline was itself the ritual, then nobody needed to see the finished shape from above. There’s also a simpler point: the makers could see what they were doing at the scale they were working. Laying out a precise curve with stakes and cord doesn’t require a view of the whole.
Is there any evidence the Nazca could fly?
There’s no credible evidence for it. The suggestion surfaces periodically, usually pointing to depictions on Nazca textiles or to a 1975 experiment in which a hot-air balloon built from period-appropriate materials was flown over the pampa. That experiment showed such a thing was physically possible, not that it happened — no balloon remains, no depictions of flight, and no supporting archaeological material have been found. The mainstream position is that the lines were laid out from the ground using surveying methods that have been experimentally reproduced.
What happened to the Nazca people?
The Nazca culture declined around AD 650, and the causes appear to be environmental as much as anything. Research suggests extensive clearance of huarango trees — deep-rooted natives that stabilised the soil and supported the water table — left the landscape far more vulnerable. Combined with severe El Niño flooding events, this could have made an already fragile agricultural system untenable. The population didn’t vanish; the region was later absorbed into the Wari sphere and eventually the Inca empire. But the distinctive Nazca cultural tradition, including geoglyph-making at this scale, came to an end.
Do archaeologists agree on why the lines were made?
Not on a single explanation, but there’s more agreement than the “eternal mystery” framing suggests. Most researchers working on the site accept that the geoglyphs are ritual in nature and connected to water, fertility and Andean religious practice, and that many lines functioned as pathways. The disagreements are about emphasis and detail — how much astronomical intent was involved, which figures relate to which water sources, how meanings changed across centuries. The 2024 finding that different geoglyph types served different social scales suggests the field is moving toward several overlapping answers rather than one.
Attribution and dating for individual geoglyphs remain uncertain, and the date ranges here are commonly cited approximations rather than settled values — the Paracas and Nazca cultural periods themselves are defined differently by different researchers. The interpretations described are competing scholarly proposals, not established fact, and the balance of expert opinion can shift as new survey work is published. The 2024 AI-assisted survey is recent and its interpretive conclusions are still being discussed within the field. Because survey work is ongoing, totals and classifications will continue to change. On the practical side, flight prices, aerodrome fees and schedules change regularly, flights are weather-dependent, and access rules to protected areas can be revised — reconfirm before you travel.